We were swimming at our hardest. Perfectly in rhythm, well warmed up, pulling hard, breathing hard. At last, I felt like a real swimmer. Except … I was going absolutely nowhere. An anxiety dream come to life. I was pulling and pushing at the water with all my might, but we had hit the point where the currents were at their strongest, and were amplified as gushing eddies coming round the tiny island. The harder I swam, the less I moved. The rocks below me were entirely static.
I continued like this for five or ten minutes before panic set in. I knew that to stop was to instantly slide back, away from the group. Exhale. Keep going. Exhale. Believe. Exhale. Glide. I glanced to my right, and saw that even Michael was having to work slightly harder.
But the demons were chasing me now. I had never stood toe to toe against nature in this way before. You can’t fight nature, I thought, and as I did, I felt tears choke in my throat. I forced an exhale, thinking of my vagus nerve relaxing. I wouldn’t let myself think it, I wouldn’t. But I did. If you can’t fight nature, what about pregnancy? I had thought it. And with that, I was lost in a world of worry. Would I ever get pregnant? What would IVF do to me? What would IVF do to us? Would it be worth it? Should we be trying to build our home for two into one for three if the signs all indicated that we couldn’t? Would we get there? When would I know?
The water swirled around me and roared in my ears. I forced the air out of my lungs, again and again. The salt water was crusting my mouth, and every breath felt like a punch as the sunlight hit my eyes.
Think of home, think of home, think of home. Be your own hero, be your own Odysseus, be ship, cargo and crew.
I repeated these things to myself again and again, forcing physical relaxation until mental solace came. I made myself feel the power in my limbs and lungs, and love it. I was strong. Your body might never be the same after this summer, I told myself. Enjoy what you have. Think of home. Soon you will be home. You will make it.
Eventually, I won the battle. And it was a battle. Every push, every pull, every breath. The rocks beneath me slid slowly out of sight. The deep blue returned. I have never, ever been so glad to be swimming so utterly out of my depth.
But the horror wasn’t over. About half an hour later, a sort of fizziness began in the tips of my fingers. I had only felt it once or twice before, in the final few metres of running events. I knew it meant that I needed oxygen, and fuel. The unintended consequence of my frequent goggles-based stops over the course of the last few months was that I simply hadn’t built up enough endurance to keep going without these mini breaks. I realised what was happening and tried to power my way through with positive thinking. Success was limited. My mind had got me thus far, but my lungs had not had the chance to catch up.
My arms started to feel heavy in the water, slapping down on the surface instead of cutting in and reaching forward. The swirling in front of my eyes seemed to be about more than the water churning around me. I stopped. I looked up. I needed help. I called to the rescue boat, and clung to it. J told the others to carry on, while I hauled myself into the boat. My breathing was laboured and erratic, my head spinning and the tips of my feet and fingers numb.
I breathed. I gulped at the orange juice on board to get some sugar into my system. I grabbed a handful of nuts. Devastated not to be in the water, I sat, breathing, for five minutes. We were so close to Ithaca. I could make out individual trees on the mountainside. Ten minutes later, I knew I couldn’t let the dream go.
‘Can I get back in?’ I asked.
J checked me, to make sure I wasn’t still delirious.
‘I have to reach Ithaca. It’s why I came.’
She nodded. I leapt off the boat – more the result of skidding on its rubber side than anything else – and headed for the grey rock. I couldn’t believe there was any strength left in me, and I vowed never to forget the moment that the island’s sea life started to make itself apparent to me. Once again the sea shallowed, and the ecosystems down there became visible. Fish shimmied between crags, sea urchins perched on ridges, and starfish danced on the side of the island. Red, yellow and orange, they had stuck themselves wherever there were gaps available, creating the appearance of arms in motion, waving at us. The starfish of Ithaca were voguing us home.
Finally I touched the rock, and burst into tears. Huge sobs, shaking my shoulders, forcing me to cling on to the island to keep myself steady. The others were already there, laughing and chatting. I had done it. I had discovered a grit I hadn’t known I had, as well as a flexibility and adaptability that I had never imagined lay within me. Determination, potentially misplaced confidence and a basic understanding of training plans and fitness – these I had long had. But now, I had slowly, over a year of marriage and a year spent in the water, learned that strength does not always mean merely ploughing forward in the face of adversity; it means changing your plans when what you’re doing isn’t getting you where you need to go; it means allowing for your surroundings, for those around you and what they require, and it means nurturing the confidence to adapt without panicking.
The promise of home had set me free to explore, and the relaxation that swimming demanded of me had taught me that calmness is strength. As I clung to that rock, smiling down at those sassy starfish, I had no idea of the extent to which my adaptability and survival skills were about to be tested.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Winter
As the plane landed back on English soil, I smiled, knowing I would be home soon, and that there were still a few months before the most difficult stages of the IVF swung into action. I was gleeful to be returning to my Penelope, but it was tinged with the melancholy of knowing this summer was past full bloom. I wanted to carry on swimming outdoors, putting my new-found strength and confidence into practice.
I sincerely believed that I would be pregnant not long after my return from Greece. I was anxious about the side effects of doing a cycle of IVF, but I was not anxious about it failing.
I was wrong. It proved to be a brutal and disorientating experience that coincided with a bout of norovirus, involved an unexpectedly strong reaction to the stimulating drugs, and culminated in over a fortnight in bed. For days I was barely able to move because of the distended belly I grew when my ovaries created sixteen eggs within a fortnight; then, just days before the egg collection surgery took place, I was felled by the virus. The surgery took over twice as long as it was scheduled to, and when I came to, I felt as if someone with metal fingernails was scraping them through my uterus. We created one usable embryo, but the cycle ended in early September with me battle-scarred, exhausted far beyond running, and with a streak of red blood that confirmed the one thing I had barely had a chance to worry about: I was not pregnant.
The Saturday morning after we realised the treatment had not been successful brought a pale grey sky with rare glimmers of sunlight. I woke up at 6 a.m. and stared at the ceiling as the tears rolled slowly, silently down the sides of my face and onto the pillow. What now? Well, it turned out there was a chink of light in the autumn clouds: swimming.
I was by now part of a Facebook group set up for those who had finished the Pool to Pier course and were looking to swim in the sea, but not alone or as part of any formal training group. When I looked at my phone that morning and saw that others were planning to take a swim from Hove to Brighton, I knew that there was only one place I wanted to be. Only one place that would still my body and mind. I rolled over and whispered to my husband that I was heading out, to walk the two kilometres to the meeting point, and to swim home.
The summer had turned sour within days of my return from Greece, and I had only managed one sea swim before the IVF injections had taken hold. I had entered the sea on a sunny day, and left it only twenty minutes later, during a huge rainstorm, invigorated by the sonic curiosity of hearing rain hit the surface of the water when my head was below it. Since then, I hadn’t been in the water for over a month.
As I walked down to the meeting point, the sun began to
part the clouds, and before long there were three of us in the water, swimming east. Once again, I was experiencing the physical grit that sea swimming required of me, and the psychological solace it provided. It was a long swim, longer than I had ever done before along the seafront. But I was swimming homewards. When we reached the stretch of shoreline in front of my flat, I said goodbye to my swimming partners, and waved at D, who was standing waiting with a hug, tears and a towel. We sat looking out over the spot where he’d lost his wedding ring fifteen months before, and consoled each other over what else we had now lost. We couldn’t tread water, we agreed; we had to keep moving.
Slowly, the overwhelming duvet of sadness that had swamped us began to shift. While the summer had not been the idyllic sea frenzy I had hoped for, once I looked up and beyond myself I saw that we were being treated to an exceptionally beautiful autumn. In fact, it barely felt like autumn. Day after day of endless blue skies seemed at last to suggest that absolutely anything was possible.
I can’t imagine ever not feeling sad for that little embryo that didn’t make it. That tiny cluster of cells that represented infinite possibilities. In addition to its actual loss, I had put aside countless plans for the autumn, anticipating physical changes that would have limited my usual predisposition to gallivant all over the country and beyond.
But after days of those wide-open skies and seemingly endless flat seas, I was reminded that I too was a bundle of cells with infinite potential. That we all are. Whereas for those first sad days it seemed like my life had been put on hold, now it began to feel as if a sliver of life had been handed back to me. We had agreed to try one more round of IVF, but for now I had a chink of time in which to use my body for as much adventure as it could manage. Sure, I was still a little swollen from the stimulation drugs, and lacking in fitness from the weeks I had been unable to run, but I was still here, wasn’t I? It was time to make plans.
The first thing we decided to do was to visit D’s dad and his girlfriend, who lived near the Lake District. I had never been there, but I had found myself increasingly tantalised by the idea of swimming in the area’s seemingly endless beautiful waters. Having been brought up largely abroad, our family holidays had been mostly spent on the Continent – for us, driving to the Lakes would have been impossibly far-flung. Consequently, the area held a position in my mind not far from Narnia, or the kingdom of Labyrinth’s Jareth the Goblin King. This had been stoked by the fact that much of the talk on Mowgli had been of those who had either swum or were planning to swim Windermere or Coniston Water, the biggest of the two lakes, which regularly held large and increasingly popular organised swims of several miles. But beyond these few facts, I didn’t really understand how many other places to swim there were up there, or how one might approach it if you weren’t taking part in a formal event.
I had no interest in embarking on a proper training regime, and given that it was early autumn, it was the wrong time of year for entering outdoor swimming events anyway. But the minute the idea of taking a swim up in the Lake District had crossed my mind, a watery genie had been let out of its bottle. I spent hours searching the Outdoor Swimming Society’s Facebook page for recommended swims and poring over pictures. I studied the body types of the swimmers in the images to see whether they looked dramatically hardier than me. Were these brave and noble types, I wondered, or just the ones with good cameras and patient partners with an eye for photography? I became borderline-addicted to putting the names of lakes and hills into Instagram and losing myself in the sliding walls of tiny square images. The more I looked, the less of a sense of perspective I seemed to have on what the Lake District was actually like.
When we got to my father-in-law’s house, I spent a further couple of hours studying Ordnance Survey maps, Wainwright Walks maps, and Google Maps, before deciding that we could quite possibly spend every hour until Christmas researching. In the end, a Lake District research intervention was performed by D, and I went with what seemed like the simplest option. I chose to do what my father-in-law suggested: to simply walk up to a tarn where D as a child used to go with his family.
We woke early the next morning and set off for a drive that nearly gave me whiplash as my head flicked between my phone, where I was obsessively looking up definitions of geographical terms such as ‘scree’ and ‘tarn’, and the scenery that was unfolding ahead of me. I was under no illusion that the Lake District was anything other than mesmerisingly beautiful, but I was utterly unprepared for how much beauty, and how much variety it managed to pack into such a relatively small area. Just as I had finished craning my neck to see the picture-book prettiness of Windermere, so large that it seemed like the seaside rather than a single body of water, we were whizzing past huge, craggy, forested mountains, which reminded me of the regular drives my own family would take through the Alps when we lived in Germany during the 1980s.
The ever-changing views were all-encompassing, and D, who had holidayed there for years as a child, was entertained by my open-jawed amazement every time we turned a corner. ‘It looks like something from Star Wars!’ I yelped only a month or two before it was revealed that they actually had shot some of the new film there. But as the car slowed, and the dog – Tess, a whippet who had become my new greatest love – started to sense that we were nearly there, I felt my stomach lurch. What the hell was I doing? D hadn’t seen me swim since June, when I had tackled the pier-to-pier swim surrounded by safety kayaks. And my father-in-law had never seen me get my toes wet in any way at all. I didn’t know where we were going, and despite my endless googling, my confidence about getting in the water was based on posts I had seen online of others doing the same sort of thing. It wasn’t like finally taking part in a 10K or a marathon, or even an event organised by my swimming course. There were no stewards, no lifeguards, no security rails – and no one to cancel the event if tide or temperature seemed too tough.
The Lake District is a series of fells (large hills) and peaks, covered in a variety of grass, forest, crag (black volcanic rock) and scree (smaller scrappy bits of rock that roll down, scattershot, from peaks, thus creating their own little snowy trails). Between them, either in the wide valleys between the mountains or in the gaps between multiple peaks, are bodies of water. Lower down, they are lakes – lush, populated and as pretty as a postcard. But higher up, nestling between the peaks, are the tarns – mountain lakes. Created by pooled rain or river water, they are usually smaller and significantly less verdant than the lakes. For someone who thought that the Lake District stopped at Beatrix Potter panoramas, their existence came as something of a surprise. They seemed … well, a little stark for someone like me. A little too hearty.
We left the car and headed up the fell, and I felt an impending sense of dread. Our walk was along a curving ridge around the side of the fell, in the shadow of Blencathra, the biggest mountain in the area. To our left was the edge of the lush green fell, sloping up and away from us. To the right was a perilous drop almost straight down to a distant outcrop of farm buildings, doll-like against the enormity of the backdrop, a river that seemed to be little more than a lick of nail varnish on a child’s toy train set, and a smattering of sheep dotted around it as if arranged by the child itself. Tess gambolled on ahead, but because of the curve of the path she vanished almost immediately. From time to time she would pop back to see how we were, and well she might have wondered. Terror was starting to take an icy grip on me. We were just walking higher and higher, for nearly an hour, and I still couldn’t see where I was going to be taking this most solitary of swims.
For someone who was used to being embraced by the watchful worlds of either formal learning or organised and insured sporting events, I was feeling increasingly alone. A world of what ifs was flooding my mind, as my breathing, laboured from the climb of the walk, started to stiffen with anxiety. Then, just as I had started to wonder if there actually was any water ahead, I saw the tarn.
It wasn’t so much that it was a landscape unlike any
I had ever seen before; it was more that it looked like the goddamn moon. Completely surrounded by rock and tumbling scree, it seemed as if the water was sitting perfectly in the top of a lunar crater. The slopes surrounding it were covered in scrubby grey, green and pale brown clumps of grass. Poking between the grass was black volcanic rock, as if someone had tipped the slate roofs of an entire town from the skies above and left them to shatter and smash. The edges of the water were black, littered with chipped rock and slate. It was as inhospitable as any landscape I’d ever seen.
What followed was a level of terror that I had only ever experienced cumulatively before. When training for a marathon, nervous about a speech or sweating over a longed-for date, I usually had the sort of creeping anxiety that nagged and tugged at me, letting me get on with things but always there, tapping at my nerves. Before my first few running events, this grew into bursts of panic when I confronted injury, or simply the fear of how long and unpredictable a marathon course could be. But this was different. This wasn’t mere nerves; it was utter terror. Condensed and distilled until sticky and potent. It was the espresso of fear.
But there was something that kept me from pegging it down that mountain faster than even Tess could run. It was the fact that it wasn’t just terror I was experiencing. It was longing, too. The water of that tarn was as black and still as a spill of ink on a laminated school book. If I’d been told that not a soul had ever touched it, I would have believed it without hesitation. I had no idea how deep it was, how cold it was, or if anything was living in it. But I wanted to get in. I longed to get in.
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